> Step by step

4. 80s gated reverb

1 Gated reverb is inextricably linked to Phil Collins, whose gated drums powered Peter Gabriel’s track Intruder in 1980. The reverb was an unnaturally compressed room sound. Later (over)uses generally relied on digital reverb, as will our example. Here, we’ve loaded a virtual drum kit into Logic and recorded a simple kick and snare pattern à la Intruder. 2 For this tutorial, we’re going to use PSP Audioware’s excellent emulation of the legendary EMT 244 and 245 Digital Reverberator units. For our purposes, we’ll need to call it up on an auxiliary send bus, so we’ll click on the track’s Send slot and then use the dropdown menu to assign it to Bus 1. 3 Now let’s go to the Audio FX slot for Bus 1, click on it, then load PSP 2442. In Logic, this is just to the right of where we assigned our send, but other DAWs will offer different methods for creating busses and instantiating effects in them. 4 We’ll turn our drum track’s Send knob up to around -6 and crank the 2442’s T(s) knob up to a full 5 seconds. That’s a really long reverb tail – it’s practically unusable. Let’s return to our Aux bus, and add a Gate plugin just after the PSP 2445 plugin – almost any gate will do. 5 We’ll activate our gate’s Sidechain dropdown and choose Bus 1 as the input. We’ll need to set the gate’s Threshold to about -32dB, the Hold to roughly 150 ms, and the Release to around 148 ms. As you can hear, this is a near ringer for the effect used all over those infamous Phil Collins tracks!